Nature Reperceived

continued

forming a sinuous hexagonal tube, towers above its shrunken companion, which at its nadir flops gently on its lax string towards its mate a few times, as if bowing gently in supplication.

Nearby, a brown metal Calderesque stabile of a candelabra-like set of arms ending in arced triangular forms accompanies a vertical series of photographs of a desert landscape. In the top picture, the stabile appears in the landscape. In the middle photo, it's gone, but a superimposed topographic grid of swirling lines over the same desert background recollects its form. The bottom photo shows only the landscape.

The viewer's eye returns to the top photo. Something funny there. The horizontal arms of the stabile mesh with the gentle hill-lines of the landscape. Perfectly. It slowly dawns: this sculpture was created for this one particular spot in the desert, to be viewed from this angle. Its lines fit into the background's topography, and nowhere else. The sculpture is a sort of photograph of the rolling contours of the desert, painted in its brown hue. The artist has made an impression of this particular stretch of nameless desert. The desert skeleton stands, as sculpture, in the gallery. The few minutes it takes for the subtlety of this work to manifest its intent in the viewer's mind makes it all the more astonishing.